First Run News

LEBANON, Conn. — Rob Sullivan still remembers the gun and the sound of his mother’s high-pitched pleas. Two thieves had burst into his parents’ Hartford home. Demanding his father’s dope stash, one of the men placed a gun to Rob’s right temple. “Just give it to them,” his mother begged his father. He was 6 years old. The incident, charred in his memory, was an early trauma among many he recalls from his childhood. He watched his father beat his mother for not having dinner ready on time or for not cleaning the house, he said. Often, she fought back.

MOGADISHU, Somalia — When a double truck bombing shattered the night in Mogadishu on Saturday, rescue workers began the grim search for survivors that has become all too common as Somalia battles an Islamist insurgency. They picked through burned-out cars and hunted as best they could in a collapsed hotel. But it was only on Sunday, as emergency workers pulled body after body from the rubble of a nearly leveled downtown street, that the magnitude of the latest attack came into focus.

SANTA ROSA, Calif. — Nathalie and Michael Internicola had about 15 minutes to grab what they could as the flames roared toward their house, and it wasn’t much: Some clothes, passports, their phones. They are grateful to be alive, they said, but as for what comes next and how and where they might rebuild their lives, they don’t have a clue. “We’re staying with friends as long as they will have us; then we don’t know,” said Ms. Internicola, 51, whose home in Santa Rosa burned to the ground, along with about 60 others in their neighborhood.

In an interview with the BBC published early Sunday, the director Woody Allen addressed the wave of allegations against Harvey Weinstein, calling it “tragic for the poor women” but also warning against a “witch hunt atmosphere.” Those comments drew harsh criticism on social media, and on Sunday night Mr. Allen released a statement calling Mr. Weinstein “a sad, sick man.” Mr.

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood’s de facto governing body, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, voted overwhelmingly on Saturday to “immediately expel” Harvey Weinstein, breaking with 90 years of precedent and turning one of the biggest Oscar players in history into a hall-of-fame pariah. The academy’s 54-member board of governors made the decision at an emergency session after investigations by The New York Times and

For decades the film producer Harvey Weinstein succeeded in hiding from public view complaint after complaint of sexual misconduct against him. But on the evening of March 28, 2015, at a rendezvous at the TriBeCa Grand, his longtime pattern of cover-ups was coming to a dramatic end. Meeting with him at the hotel was Ambra Battilana, a 22-year-old model from Italy, who had reported to the police the night before that Mr. Weinstein had groped her during a business meeting. She was wearing a wire. As Ms. Battilana asked Mr.

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has dispatched an experienced federal hate crimes lawyer to Iowa to help prosecute a man charged with murdering a transgender high school student last year, a highly unusual move that officials said was personally initiated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In taking the step, Mr.

KIRKUK, Iraq — Iraqi state television said early Monday that Iraqi forces had begun an operation to seize the Kurdish-held city of Kirkuk and its surrounding oil fields, despite weeks of urgent efforts by the United States to keep tensions between its allies from boiling over into another war in the Middle East. In a brief statement released to the state-run network, Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, ordered troops to impose security in the area “in cooperation with the people of Kirkuk and the pesh merga,” or Kurdish fighters. State-run TV said the initial assault by Iraqi troops, count

SEOUL, South Korea — The United States military said on Monday that it would practice evacuating noncombatant Americans out of South Korea in the event of war and other emergencies, as the two allies began a joint naval exercise amid heightened tensions with North Korea. The exercise, known as Courageous Channel, is scheduled from Oct. 23 to 27.

When North Korean hackers tried to steal $1 billion from the New York Federal Reserve last year, only a spelling error stopped them.